BLADERUNNER: save games may not work on macOS Catalina

[antoniou79]

Users on GOG forum have reported potential issues with the save system.
Saving may fail with no error message.

The solution seems to be a reboot or explicitly allowing the OS write permissions for the documents (?) folder.

Quote from forum post:
"Nothing happens when I try to save a game, doesn't show up in the save games list. I was able to continue playing and there were no error messages or crashes. It was so innocuous I actually thought it had worked. I only noticed when I quit and tried to resume my saved game that it wasn't there. I subsequently tried to save a game and realised it wasn't ever being created."
​https://www.gog.com/forum/blade_runner/save_not_working

At the very least, we should inform the player if the save attempt has failed.

[Thunderforge]

#11427 also reports this issue for a wide variety of games on macOS, sometimes with nothing more than save games failing silently (as happens here) and sometimes with greater problems including ScummVM crashes.

[criezy]

I have two notes there related to running the Bladerunner GOG application on macOS Catalina:

• The GOG application is a launcher that then start ScummVM. This is an issue because macOS tries to track the user-facing process (the application that the user started) when a process tries to access the Documents folder to prompt the user about authorising access to it for the process. In this particular case when ScummVM tries to access the Documents folder, macOS fails to track the user-facing process (the GOG launcher executable) and as a result doesn't prompt the user to authorise access. This issue does not happen when the user runs ScummVM directly.
• When the user does not authorise access to the Documents folder, saving savegames works anyway. However listing and loading savegames does not work. This means that the user can find his savegames later on if he then authorises access to the Documents folder for ScummVM (or change the savepath in the ScummVM.ini file in the GOG Bladerunner app bundle and then copies manually the savesgames to the new location).

I suspect this last point is also valid for ScummVM in general and not just the Bladerunner GOG app, but I have not checked that yet.

[somaen]

Is this still a problem, and is this mostly a problem with GoG's launcher?

[antoniou79]

I have not seen any post about this for a long time on the GOG forums (and I am monitoring them almost daily since the ScummVM-powered Blade Runner release). The last mention of it was probably the last post in the linked GOG forum thread of the OP.

I cannot test myself though.

It would be nice to have some warning to the user if a saved game has failed (especially manual saves, because auto-saving fail warnings may be a nuisance).

But according to criezy, this may have not even been a case of failing to save game, just a failure (due to wrong permissions) to list the saved games.

The GOG thread does imply that launching directly from the ScummVM launcher does indeed resolve this -- although the last post there is confusing (seems to say the exact opposite?).
​https://www.gog.com/forum/blade_runner/save_not_working/post17